Quote

Life is wild by definition. And organic existence is violent. Though I find this hard to accept. And I know it goes against the cultural grain of therapeutic smoothing so dominant in what we like to call 'cultural discourse'.

Tim Winton

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Tim Winton
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 4
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Perth
Australia
Timothy John Winton
Find
Wild
Therapeutic
Hard
Violent
Organic
Life
Accept
Discourse
Like
Accepting
Dominant
Goes
Grain
Existence
Definition
Call
Cultural
Though
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Smoothing

More quotes by Tim Winton

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In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.
Tim Winton
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We live in specific places. We are marked by a place.
Tim Winton
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I wanted to be a writer all my life. Since I was 10. And then at a certain point I began to assume I was one, which is rich, I know. I didn't meet a writer until I was nearly an adult, so I had no idea what I'd bet the farm on.
Tim Winton
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I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like a desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly.
Tim Winton
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Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.
Tim Winton
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Nothing is as daunting as the threats associated with global warming. That's the biggie. Everyone bangs on about rising sea levels but the real challenge of a warming planet is ocean acidification. An acid ocean spells the end of life on earth.
Tim Winton
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The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.
Tim Winton
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Overfishing is an obvious threat to our capacity to feed ourselves.
Tim Winton
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I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.
Tim Winton
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Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.
Tim Winton
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And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.
Tim Winton
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The end of the world begins in the sea we love.
Tim Winton
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I don't consciously watch and file lived moments for my work. I have a couple of writer friends who do that and it creeps me out, to be honest. I know people think I must do that too, but I don't. But I do have a long memory.
Tim Winton
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For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.
Tim Winton
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It is always amusing to me and delightful of course that my books sell so well in America and other parts of the world. I can't imagine what people must think as they read my books in Poland. Or in Hebrew and Greek. People are reading all the stories which are about bits of Western Australia.
Tim Winton
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I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have
Tim Winton
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Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers
Tim Winton
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When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn't belong anywhere,... It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed..., that's where I belonged, that was my country.
Tim Winton
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The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep. Mostly the scenes are familiar, but sometimes everything is strange, the people unknown.
Tim Winton
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When you're surfing you're not thinking about where you parked the car or what you're going to do when you grow up or what you're going to buy when you've got lots of money. You know, you're just there. You're in the moment. And I think in a contemporary world, that's a rare privilege.
Tim Winton